ownCloud Statement Concerning the Formation of Nextcloud

Today’s announcement by our former colleague Frank Karlitschek, that he intends to launch a competitive product to ownCloud into the market using recently poached developers, has both surprised us and – admittedly – disappointed us. In the past, Frank has made a wealth of contributions to the development of the ownCloud Community Edition. With today’s […]

Today’s announcement by our former colleague Frank Karlitschek, that he intends to launch a competitive product to ownCloud into the market using recently poached developers, has both surprised us and – admittedly – disappointed us. In the past, Frank has made a wealth of contributions to the development of the ownCloud Community Edition. With today’s announcement, he is no longer related to the ownCloud project and has started a competing community.

ownCloud will continue to deliver software and maintenance to our future and existing customer base. Support, consulting and professional services continue to be available. Product improvements will continue to be our focus as we deliver on our vision of “Universal File Access”. We are prepared to face any form of legitimate competition, because we are convinced of the quality of ownCloud.

One of Frank’s criticisms concerned the need to strengthen the Community. In this regard, we have been working on the creation of the ownCloud Foundation, the formation of which we announced earlier this week. The Foundation’s board will consist of 7 members, among them developers elected from the GitHub community, community users and one ownCloud representative. This will strengthen the Community in the long term, and ensures the availability of a free, entirely open source version of ownCloud. The Community Edition is and remains the backbone of our company.

Just yesterday, ownCloud staged an event in Frankfurt, Germany hosted by ownCloud and sponsored by IBM and B1 Systems, where users demonstrated the full range of possibilities of ownCloud in a variety of interesting community and enterprise projects, including Stuttgarter Lebensversicherung a.G., Helmholtz-Zentrum für Umweltforschung, DESY, Agfa ICS and Senacor. In return, ownCloud unveiled its roadmap for upcoming versions to a wealth of positive feedback. Future collaboration capabilities for documents, spreadsheets and presentations in partnership with Collabora was also very well received.

Unfortunately, the announcement has consequences for ownCloud, Inc. based in Lexington, MA. Our main lenders in the US have cancelled our credit. Following American law, we are forced to close the doors of ownCloud, Inc. with immediate effect and terminate the contracts of 8 employees. The ownCloud GmbH is not directly affected by this and the growth of the ownCloud Foundation will remain a key priority.

Pretty serious. Hope all are well, but would consider changing the wording of this. It sounds vindictive towards the wrong party. Sounds to me like you should go off on the lenders as they are essentially the ones doing the most harm.

One point for me to stay with ownCloud for now. The main team changed to nextCloud and just leave their previously done mess behind (like broken upgdates, not possible to skip major upgrades, conflict with the debian packagers etc.).

If these “mess” items you mention are fixed in NextCloud, and still not fixed in ownCloud, doesn’t that suggest they’re not the fault of the developers who have moved to NextCloud, but rather of the management who remain in ownCloud?

I do believe the wrong wording was sent in this post, i don’t think is time to panic, community has shown resiliency and will not give up nor bend its knee to the pleasure of others. This is the time for new a fresh-minded developers to join the project and contribute and today will be a thing of the past, no need to run away, just face your reality and keep finding good talent willing to support this product.

For us, users, the situations seems to by very hazy… Dividing the project you divide people – now everybody will consider – stay here or go to the other. This is very sad, when problems between project’s leaders leads to the disintegration of the project. Mr. Frank told us before that he is leaving the project, and will always close to the OwnCloud. Really? Having his own competitive project? Or just he took his toys and went to play a different sandbox? In my humble opinion all this situation is not clear (we don’t know real reasons) and seems to… Read more »

I’m just a regular user. I use OwnCloud for private and professional work and will continue using OwnCloud for now. If the project survives I will stick with it. It has made a name for itself, and has provided a real alternative to DropBox, GoogleDrive etc.. BTW – the use of the word “Next” in NextCloud is unfortunate in my opinion. The “next best thing” is not necessarily a positive attribute for a new product, it’s just another name, unlike “OwnCloud”. My advice to the remaining OwnCloud community is to show that you can carry the flag and continue the… Read more »

There is a lesson to be learned here. The real strength of open source is the commitment and participation of the non-paid community of developers, testers, documenters, etc. Corporations come and go. I’ve learned this the hard way. A good open source project will outlive many companies and will be an enduring contribution to humanity. Personally I’m glad to see Owncloud Inc go. I know those are hard words for those of you who were wrapped up in this and I am sorry to have to say them. Hopefully you will have no problem finding new gigs. I think the… Read more »

Why do you see Nextcloud as competition? It´s all Open Source and Free Software! You can easily merge the features back and forth, like open office, libre office, apache office whatever.. I personally moved on to Nextcloud aswell. As a developer, i see my Pull Requests valued in the nextcloud community and merged. The PR i created against the ownCloud android app, is open since 1,5 years and no one has replied / even noticed it. On the other hand, if there is real competition, it is beneficial for anyone except the leaders / money earners of a project, users… Read more »

I’ve been using ownCloud for years, and I’ve been *frustrated* by ownCloud for years. By poor UI’s, feature incompatibility between desktop and mobile clients (say, a desktop client that can only sync entire directories and not individual files and an Android client that can only sync individual files and not entire directories), the abandonment of the OSX version of the server, and the overwhelming sense that I was being pushed to use for-pay versions of the software and the free versions were deliberately inconvenient to get and use (eg the Android ownCloud client being a paid download in Google Play,… Read more »

“Surprised” and “disappointed” aren’t facts, they’re emotions. And the final paragraph is quite clearly meant to color the reader’s opinion of Karlitschek: his “poaching” of developers “forced” ownCloud, Inc to shut down, and cost eight people their jobs. No responsibility taken on OC’s part at all; they were “forced” to do it. These things don’t happen in a vacuum. There were clearly disagreements leading up to this point — certainly with Karlitschek, and likely with the developers who quit OC to continue working for him. And if their lenders all pulled out, it sounds like OC was in a pretty… Read more »

> eg the Android ownCloud client being a paid download in Google Play, and the free version in F-Droid often being several versions behind and constantly crashing

Sorry, but this is totally nonsense. The f-droid version is built from the same source but maintenanced by contributors of f-droid not related to ownCloud at all. Please do some research before spreading such stuff.

Exactly where did I say the F-Droid app was officially compiled and distributed by ownCloud? Nowhere, that’s where. What I said is that the version on Google Play — the official, ownCloud-provided version — was for-pay, and anyone looking for a free version received an inferior experience, *because ownCloud did not provide a decent-quality free version*. I suppose my parenthetical aside could have gone into more detail on the specifics of how the F-Droid binaries were compiled and distributed, but I assumed that anyone reading this comments section would already be aware of those details. I seem to have been… Read more »

Just because i have updated a few apps in f-droid on my own. The majority reading the blog don’t have this knowledge and you’re writing in your sentences that you where pushed to use the not updated and crashing non-paid version. Thats just non-sense…

Actually, what I wrote was that I was being pushed to use the for-pay version. In fact, my exact words were “I was being pushed to use for-pay versions of the software”. You can scroll up and read the original post to confirm if you’d like. I know that questioning somebody’s reading comprehension skills is about the biggest cliche on the Internet, but you seriously seem to be inferring all sorts of things from my comments that aren’t actually there (while stubbornly refusing to acknowledge things in the OP that *are* there). Almost as if you’re more interested in pushing… Read more »

I’m actually not surprised about any of this. oc developers were constantly ignoring feedback and suggestions by closing issues without having resolved them or stating a valid explanation. The group admin mess has been open for years, the calendar/contacts have been re-designed to the point that they are unusable, and every criticism has been taken as a personal attack. This is no way to run a project.

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